Sunday, February 13, 2022

I'd never heard of Paul Gunn until now... and this story sounds made up, too astonishing to be true, but it's actual real WW2 aviation history


In this remarkable WWII story by New York Times best-selling author John R. Bruning, a renegade American pilot fights against all odds to rescue his family - imprisoned by the Japanese - and revolutionizes modern warfare along the way.

From the knife fights and smuggling runs of his youth to his fiery days as a pioneering naval aviator, Paul Irving "Pappy" Gunn played by his own set of rules and always survived on his wits and fists. But when he fell for a conservative Southern belle, her love transformed him from a wild and reckless airman to a cunning entrepreneur whose homespun engineering brilliance helped launch one of the first airlines in Asia.

Pappy was drafted into MacArthur's air force when war came to the Philippines; and while he carried out a top-secret mission to Australia, the Japanese seized his family. Separated from his beloved wife, Polly, and their four children, Pappy reverted to his lawless ways. He carried out rescue missions with an almost suicidal desperation. Even after he was shot down twice and forced to withdraw to Australia, he waged a one-man war against his many enemies - including the American high command and the Japanese - and fought to return to the Philippines to find his family.


Without adequate planes, supplies, or tactics, the US Army Air Force suffered crushing defeats by the Japanese in the Pacific. Over the course of his three-year quest to find his family, Pappy became the renegade who changed all that. With a brace of pistols and small band of loyal followers, he robbed supply dumps, stole aircraft, invented new weapons, and modified bombers to hit harder, fly farther, and deliver more destruction than anything yet seen in the air. When Pappy's modified planes were finally unleashed during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the United States scored one of the most decisive victories of World War II.

Taking listeners from the blistering skies of the Pacific to the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines to one of the the war's most notorious prison camps, Indestructible traces one man's bare-knuckle journey to free the people he loved and the aerial revolution he sparked that continues to resonate across America's modern battlefields.



I kid you not, when I read the summary, I thought that it was a book of fiction, and looked online to figure out if this was real or just a great adventure story. It's real.

At the age of ten, Paul Gunn knew that he wanted to fly when he saw his first airplane. He left school after 6th grade. He later joined the US Navy when he was 17 years old hoping to become a Naval pilot. His poor education prevented him from becoming an officer and a pilot. Instead, he became an aviation machinist's mate. He spent most of his Navy time at Pensacola where he met his future wife.

He saved his military pay, and bought himself a surplus seaplane and taught himself to fly. After he left the Navy he heard that the Navy had just started to allow enlisted men to be trained as pilots. He re-enlisted in the Navy and was sent to flight school. He graduated as a Navy pilot in the spring of 1925.

Over the next 12 years Gunn served as a flight instructor at Pensacola, then as a fighter and seaplane pilot with the Fleet and finally as a VIP pilot at Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington, D.C.

He retired from the Navy for the second time in 1937 and worked for Bob Tyce businessman in Hawaii. Bob Tyce was later to be the first American to be killed in the Japanese air raid on Hawaii.

In about 1939 Gunn moved to the Philippines to work for a wealthy Filipino flying a twin-engined Beechcraft. With encouragement from Gunn, his Filipino boss started a new airline called Philippines Air Lines (PAL).

The aircraft and personnel of Philippines Air Lines were commandeered once the reports came through of the Japanese bombing of Hawaii on 7 December 1941. Gunn and his friend Dan Stickle were immediately sworn into the Army Air Force. Stickle was a former sailor, whom Gunn had encouraged to move to Manila from Hawaii. Gunn was given the rank of Captain and Stickle became a 1st Lieutenant.

Gunn was ordered to use PAL's aircraft and any others he could find to establish an air transport squadron. He initially had 4 aircraft, a Sikorsky seaplane and 3 Twin-engined Beechcrafts. Unfortunately by the end of that first day, the Japanese attacked the airfield and destroyed the Sikorsky and damaged the other 3 aircraft.

Gunn relocated the 3 Beechcrafts to a local cemetery. He and friends knocked down some headstones and used them to construct a makeshift runway. Helping him was his friend Dan Stickle, Harold G. Slingsby and Louis Connelly.

Slingsby was a Consolidated employee who had been ferrying Consolidated PBY-5 Catalinas to the Dutch East Indies. Connelly was another PAL pilot.

For the next few weeks in December 1941, they flew supplies and personnel around the Philippines. They were often attacked by Japanese aircraft and attracted both Japanese and friendly ground fire.

Gunn was badly damaged by an attacking Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero on 13 December 1941 over Cebu. As he struggled back to base, he was hit again by friendly anti-aircraft fire from the Philippines Air Force at Zablan airfield. He struggled back to Nichols airfield near Manila where he crash landed the aircraft.

Gunn was ordered to fly Manuel Quezon, the President of the Philippines and his family to Mindanao. Then on Christmas Eve 1941 he was ordered to fly a load of passengers to Australia. He drew all his military pay and borrowed as much money as he could and left with his wife "Polly" and his 4 children. He told his wife to tell the Japs he had been killed in a plane crash a few weeks ago if she was captured by the Japanese.

When Gunn left for Australia, his friend Dan Stickle moved to Clark Field to provide maintenance assistance for the fighter aircraft based there. Stickle was captured by the Japs in January 1942 but was able to convince them that he was a civilian mechanic. He was placed in an internment camp at Santo Tomas University. Gunn's wife and 4 children were also sent to the same camp.

Gunn made it through to Brisbane. On 20 January 1942, twenty crated P-40 Kittyhawks arrived in Brisbane. Gunn round up a crew of American and Australian personnel and started to de-crate and assemble the Kittyhawks. More crated Kittyhawks were due shortly on another ship. Gunn also rounded up 25 pilots from the 17th Fighter Group who had recently arrived in Brisbane from the Philippines to help with the Kittyhawk assembly.

The Kittyhawks were fully assembled, and test flown by the end of January 1942. The young airmen amongst his work crew started to call the 40 year old Gunn by his new nickname of "Pappy". On 16 February 1942, 17 Kittyhawks, formed into two flights, left Brisbane.

From Brisbane they would fly 400 miles due west to Charleville. Then a further 550 miles to Cloncurry, still in Queensland. The next leg was a 500 mile hop to Daly Waters in the Northern Territory and then finally the leg to Darwin. This route was part of what was known as the "Brereton Route" from Brisbane to Java. It was a total distance of 3,600 miles. "Pappy" Gunn led one of the two flights in his Beechcraft (also known as a C-45). They arrived in Darwin 3 days later minus 3 Kittyhawks which had crashed along the way.

3 days after their arrival in Darwin, General Brereton flew in and ordered the Kittyhawks to fly to Java. They had originally thought that their destination would be the Philippines. "Pappy" Gunn led the 2 flights of Kittyhawks to Java in his Beechcraft. He returned to Timor Island with a spare tire for one of the Kittyhawks and after refuelling headed for Del Monte airfield on Mindanao. 

"Pappy" Gunn then decided he would fly back to the Philippines and rescue some more fighter pilots from Del Monte and take them back to Australia, before they were captured. These pilots had escaped from Clark Field and the fierce fighting on Bataan. As he approached Zamboanga he was spotted by a Japanese floatplane. Gunn's Beechcraft was hit badly and he had to crash land it. He was luckily uninjured, and decided to set his aircraft on fire to convince the Japs that he had not survived the crash. He hid in the thick jungle while the Japanese floatplane circled overhead.

The next morning after a restless night in the jungle, Gunn set out for the small airfield near Zamboanga. His friend Dan Connelly landed in a Beechcraft as he arrived at the small airfield. Connelly had landed to obtain spare parts from a B-17 Flying Fortress that had crashed there a few days earlier. Connelly required the parts for another B-17 at Del Monte, which they were planning to fly to Australia. It was Connelly that broke the news to Gunn that his wife and 4 children were in a Japanese internment camp.

Connelly flew Gunn and the B-17 parts back to Del Monte. Within 3 days, Gunn and the local mechanics had repaired the B-17. With "Pappy" Gunn as pilot, the B-17 took off with 22 pilots and mechanics on board and headed for Australia. Connelly and 6 others accompanied them in the Beechcraft.

B-25 named "Not in Stock"

During the Java campaign "Pappy" Gunn met up with and became great friends with Lt. Col. John "Big Jim" Davies, the commanding officer of the 3rd Attack Group, later known as the 3rd Bomb Group. By then Gunn was the commanding officer of a newly organized troop carrier squadron. Gunn spent a lot of time with the men of the 3rd Attack Group, especially the mechanics. The 3rd Attack Group had arrived at Charters Towers on 1 March 1942.

In March 1942, "Pappy" Gunn and "Big Jim" Davies appropriated some B-25 Mitchell bombers which had been delivered to Australia for the Dutch air force. The Dutch were short of pilots and the B-25's had remained unused for some time. Gunn later also appropriated some bomb sights from the Dutch for the B-25s.

On 5 April 1942, the B-25's that "Pappy" Gunn and "Big Jim" Davies had appropriated from the Dutch, were used in their first combat in an attack on Gasmata.


He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the waning days of the war and served as an aviation mechanist’s mate, learning the technical skills he would later use in World War II. While not a navy pilot, he took flying lessons and eventually bought his own surplus aircraft. He married Clara Louise Crosby on June 7, 1921; they had two sons and two daughters.

In 1923, the navy offered Gunn the chance to become a pilot if he would reenlist, and he became a fighter pilot in the “Top Hat” Squadron, later serving as an instructor at the navy base in Pensacola, Florida. In 1939, having served for twenty years, Gunn retired from the navy and moved to Hawaii with his family to start a charter flying service. He was soon hired to start an airline in the Philippines, flying Twin Beech passenger planes. When World War II started, he was commissioned as a captain in the Army Air Corps, flying reconnaissance and transport missions; he survived a crash in the jungle after being shot down by Japanese fighter planes. Gunn had to leave his family behind when he flew key U.S. personnel to Australia at the end of 1941, and his wife and four children were interned at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila from January 20, 1942, until their liberation in February 1945.

Gunn, who was given the nickname “Pappy” by the much younger fliers he served with in World War II, used the skills he had learned during his first stint in the navy to begin modifying U.S. aircraft to fight the Japanese more effectively. In August 1942, he installed several fifty-caliber machineguns into the nose of an A-20 Havoc light bomber of the Third Attack Group, which would make it more deadly in low-level strafing attacks. When Major General George Kenney, commander of the Fifth Air Force in the Pacific, learned about the modifications, he brought Gunn onto his staff as “special projects officer” and ordered him to modify sixteen more A-20s, including installation of bomb racks to drop parachute-fragmentation bombs. Gunn’s modified aircraft were used in the successful raid against a Japanese airfield at Buna on September 12, 1942.

Pleased with the success of the initial modifications, Kenney ordered Gunn to modify B-25 Mitchell bombers by adding more forward-firing machineguns onto each aircraft. A squadron was equipped in time to perform effective service in the February 1943 Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Gunn, now promoted to major, was sent back to the United States to oversee North American Aviation’s factory production of B-25s with the added strafing guns and a forward-firing 75mm cannon in their noses. Gunn later returned to the Pacific, where he was wounded in a Japanese bombing attack on Leyte in late 1944, which removed him from the war. Reunited with his family after the liberation of the Philippines, Gunn retired from the army as a full colonel on June 30, 1948, because of physical disability.


The only true story I've posted that I think is more astonishing, is the escape from Auschwitz

5 comments:

  1. I for one greatly appreciate the effort you put into bringing the stories of those past warriors who gave us everything to light!

    To our heroes!

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    1. thank you! This is the 2nd most incredible story I believe I've posted, the escape from Auchwitz was a bit more astonishing https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2017/12/kazimierz-piechowski-member-of-polish.html

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  2. This is a great story that should be made into a movie. I'd much rather watch a movie about this hero instead of all of the remakes and theater versions of old TV shows that are out lately.

    I found an article that said Sony bought the film rights to Indestructible back in 2016, but I didn't see anything else after that.

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    1. A mini series would be fantastic!
      I just learned that Firestarter is getting remade, which won't be better than Drew Barrymore's original... it's so despairing that Hollywood is fixated on remaking so damn many movies and tv shows instead of new stuff

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    2. imagine a series like Band Of Brothers, or South Pacific, that did the stories about New Zealand and Australia aviation in WW2... as I recall the Steak and Eggs plane getting built from the scrap heap, to get fresh food in trade for airplane parts

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